projects
Sojourner for Couture in Orbit, 2016
Farid Akmal Karim’s Sojourner was presented at the Couture in Orbit show, a project by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Science Museum, London, in 2016. Sojourner is a speculative design project which was based on what future wearables might look like and what they could be made from in order to adapt to harsh and largely unexplored environments in a scenario where humans are terraforming a new planet. Farid incorporated into Sojourner ecological and sustainable materials such as Sympatex, Bionic Yarn textiles combined with advanced technological material such as 37.5. Sojourner can be seen featured in Huffpost and Euronews.
Couturier and the Art of Survival: A Technologist’s Guide, 2016
Couturier and the Art of Survival is speculative design project; an artefact, a guidebook which looks into the hypothetical future of the aesthetic embellishments of couture and the couturier in their struggle to remain relevant in an ever-changing and digital future. Couturier and the Art of Survival seeks to explain how technology can aid in this endeavour and affect the human perception of adornment as a wearable. It is an exploration in updating crafts and disciplines to add dimensionality for wearables of the future. This project was featured in the 2016 Postgraduate Show at Ravensbourne Univeristy London and also on HuffPost.
https://ravensbournepost.com/portfolio_page/technologists_guide/
Corpus Callosum, 2016
Corpus Callosum is an applied speculative design research project looking into wearable technology application in extending the reach and proximity of the human body. Based on Michio Kaku’s concept of organism consciousness pending on the amount of feedback loops that it perceives about it’s surrounding environment, this project looks into applications of sensors and data in order to imbue such feedback loops into a wearable and the organism wears it. It posits that as more sophisticated sensors and microcomputers are developed, the more possible it would be to create a fully conscious wearable that extends the perception of its wearer. This resulted in the creation of a speculative design arterfact which incorporated the sensors to perceive proximity and heart rate sensors along with Nitinol wire to replicate the the body’s stress response to oncoming threats and project them into the wearable.
Project NafTech
Project NafTech is an applied technology research project as well as a speculative design project which looks into the future of clothes-mending. Several traditional techniques such as darning and faggoting combined with the concept of kintsukuroi, a Japanese philosophy on mending, the project resulted in several interpretations of these methods translated into practical 3D printing applications.